How Red Hat Does Open Source: From GNOME to OpenStack

Red Hat is one of the many vendors and developers contributing to the evolution and success of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, and helping to lead Red Hat's OpenStack efforts is Senior Principal Software Engineer Mark McLoughlin.

McLoughlin joined Red Hat nine years ago, and has worked on the open source GNOME Linux desktop as well as on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). McLoughlin attributes his years of experience working within the GNOME community as one of the keys to helping him in his role as a leading contributor to the OpenStack effort.

"I put down a lot of my success in OpenStack to the fact that I've been through this before with GNOME and I know the dynamics of working with lots of developers with different interests and priorities," he says.

McLoughlin's experience with GNOME taught him how to enable consensus across developers and how futile flame wars could be. The OpenStack community is as diverse as the GNOME community and is also filled with passionate developers.

And while OpenStack has been through one major transition so far (the rewrite of the Keystone authentication engine), "in another community that might have extremely painful, but in OpenStack, controversies tend not to lead to the same out of proportion flame war discussions," McLoughlin said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.